Yet more madness from Brussels. "Freedom od Panorama." Clause 46 (formerly the subject of Amendment 421 in committee) of the Julia Reda report on Copyright issues involves the right to publish pictures of public buildings and artworks such as sculptures permanently installed in p ublic places.
- Considers that the commercial use of photographs, video footage or oth er images of works which are permanently located in physical public places should always be subject to prior authorisation from the authors or any pro xy acting for them; In some countries such publications require a permission from the architect or rights holder of the public artwork, while the majority of EU member st ates enjoys the so-called Freedom of Panorama, which allows anyone to publi sh photographs, documentary films and other works depicting public places w ithout restriction. It was anticipated that Freedom of Panorama would become universal across E urope. The proposal adopted in committee would, should it become law, abolish the existing comprehensive Freedom of Panorama laws in a majority of EU Member States. The draft report pointed out that the need to acquire a licence for such ev eryday activities as sharing one's holiday pictures on social media was ana chronistic and that Freedom of Panorama should become a rule in the entire European Union. In the vote the legal affairs committee turned this proposal on its head, b y adopting the most restrictive amendment on the question of Freedom of Pan orama. As a consequence of this absurd proposal, restricting the Freedom of Panora ma in Europe restricted to non-commercial use only would see many internet sites having to comb through their content to expunge anything which offend ed this new proposal. Wikipedia, for example, would have to expend huge res ources to remove anything which did not comply. This would involve many tens of thousands of images of public places in Eur ope. It might be thought that a restriction of Freedom of Panorama for commercia l use may only prove a problem for companies seeking to make money by selli ng photographs. In practice, the distinction between commercial and non-com mercial is much more complicated. If you upload a holiday picture to Facebook, an individual does not make an y profit from that. By agreeing, however, to the terms of service of Facebook, which state
- that you are giving permission to Facebook to use your picture co mmercially (Section 9.1 of Facebook's Terms of Service), and
- that you have cleared all the necessary rights in order to do so (5.1 of Facebook's Terms of Service) In effect, if the commercial use of photographs depicting a public building requires a licence from the architect or other creator, it may then be you r responsibility to find out
- whether the building is still protected by copyright (that is whe ther the architect died more than 70 years ago) and
- who actually owns the rights today At that point one would have to conclude a licence agreement with the right s holder or responsible collecting society that explicitly allows the comme rcial use of the picture by Facebook before you can legally upload your hol iday pictures to Facebook. The same applies for any other social network and/or commercial image hosti ng sites that typically draft their terms of service in a way that protects them from liability. A restriction to Freedom of Panorama to non-commercial use would therefore bring millions of Europeans into conflict with copyright law over their per fectly harmless, everyday online usage. In some respects, violating copyrig ht is not only a matter of civil law but also of criminal law. Clearly this is a completely absurd and impractical proposal: indeed it ma y be wholly unenforceable in practice, which is another reason not to pass it. UKIP will oppose Paragraph 46 of the Reda Report now before the Europea n Parliament. This is typical incompetent, ill-thought out and unnecessary legislation. I t will destroy an explicit British freedom guaranteed in our copyright legi slation for over 100 years. Until now, everyone in Britain has been free to stand in a public place and take photographs of any monument or building t hey chose. The only sure-fire way to stop the EU imposing silly laws upon us is to 'Sa y No' to the EU at every turn.